Styrofoam and other insulating coolers are well known for maintaining temperature of beverages and food. The typical configuration is to provide a substantially closed container having four walls, a floor, and a lid. Frequently, ice is also placed into the storage area to help keep the beverages and food cold.
It is also known to use eutectic solutions such as Blue Ice™ to keep the items within a cooler cold. Eutectic solutions have a much greater ability to absorb heat than does ice. A container of Blue Ice™ or other freezable material may be cooled to a temperature near or below the freezing point of water in a home freezer, and then used to cool the contents of a cooler.
Although merely placing a container of freezing material into a cooler is generally adequate for keeping beverages and food items cold, such practice is inadequate for rapidly cooling beverages. Among other things, the cooling material is typically formed as a large block, and does not have sufficient contact with a beverage to rapidly reduce the temperature of the beverage. Cooling material is sometimes placed within a foldable jacket, which could conceivably be wrapped about a beverage can. See e.g., PCT patent application number PCT/US01/43507. But since the jackets are normally flat, folding them around a container as small as a beverage container provides only a few lines of contact with the can, rather than larger surfaces. Moreover, known jackets are undesirably bulky, prone to punctures, and unworkable in many ways.
It is possible to construct a cooling chamber that is sized and dimensioned to provide broad contact with a soda, beer, water, or other small beverage container. But such chambers would be too large to conveniently fit inside the freezer portion of a typical home refrigerator. Furthermore, when a cooling chamber is configured such that it generally surrounds a beverage container, so as to be in intimate contact therewith, it may be difficult to remove the beverage container from the chamber. This problem may be exacerbated by thermal contraction and/or thermal expansion that occur during the cooling and warming processes.
In view of the foregoing, it is desirable to provide a beverage cooler that is configured to be in intimate contact with one or more beverages so as to rapidly cool the beverages and which, at least in some configurations, has a size (such as an opened or disassembled size) that is smaller than its size when it is being used to cool the beverage(s), such that the beverage cooler can easily fit within a home freezer. It is further desirable to provide a beverage cooler that facilitates easy removal of the beverage container therefrom.